Built: Dividend Investing for Retirement Income

For thirty years your money had one job: get bigger. Now it has to pay you — every month, for the rest of your life.

For the options route to the same question, see Harvested, on covered calls and cash-secured puts for retirement income.

That is a harder question, and it is not the one your portfolio was built to answer.

Dividend investing is a sound answer to it. It has worked for decades, and a retiree can run it personally for twenty years. So the useful question is not whether it works. It is why it holds for some people and quietly comes apart for others — using the same companies, the same payments, and the same reasoning about what to buy.

Income almost never breaks where people look for the break. By the time a dividend is cut, the company has usually known for a year or more. The decision that made the cut possible is older still — made before a single holding was chosen, at the moment of purchase, or afterward in how the pieces were fitted together. The cut is where the trouble becomes visible. It is not where it began.

So this is a diagnostic, not a shopping list. Twenty chapters, each naming one way retirement income fails, sorted into the five stages every income portfolio passes through in order:

CONTEXT — Was this the right job for this money?
SELECTION — Can the businesses afford to pay?
VEHICLES — Do you know what you actually bought?
CONSTRUCTION — Is this a portfolio, or a pile?
KEEPING — Will you still hold it in year twelve?

The order is the point. A mistake at one stage makes every stage after it impossible to judge — so the same five questions can be put to any portfolio, in sequence, and the first one answered no is where the work starts.

Inside, you will learn how to:

• Work out what your capital can actually produce — and what to do when the honest answer is not enough
• Read a high yield for what it usually is: a falling price wearing a percentage sign
• Test whether a company can afford its dividend in the year paying it turns inconvenient
• Tell a dividend from a distribution — and spot the fund that has been handing back your own capital for years and reporting it as income
• Build a payment calendar you can live on, hold each asset in the account built to receive it, and keep a buffer so a bad quarter never forces a sale
• Decide now what you will do the morning a dividend is cut, so it is not decided in the first hour
• Audit your own portfolio once a year, five questions, about an hour

What sets this book apart is what it refuses to do. There are no tickers and no portfolio to copy — any such list ages badly, and owning one still leaves you unable to judge the next thing you are offered. There is no yield the other books were concealing, no steady eight percent. You get the screen itself — every test, every threshold, and the reasoning that produced them — so your judgment still works on a company this book has never heard of.

And nothing here asks you to be disciplined at the moment it matters, because almost nobody is. Every fix is structural: decided in advance and written where a worse version of you cannot quietly revise it. You finish with a one-page income policy statement, an annual audit worksheet, every threshold in the book on one reference sheet, and a routine that runs in twenty minutes a quarter and one afternoon a year.

Written for the retiree who wants dependable monthly income from businesses they actually understand — whether the rollover has just landed and nothing is bought yet, or the portfolio was built some other way and has disappointed. The mistakes are the same mistakes. Only the tense is different.

From the author of Harvested, and written the same way: one honest idea at a time, the catch named as plainly as the reward.

The income was lost long before the dividend was cut. This is a book about the years before.

Look inside

A few pages from the paperback. Select a page to see it full size.

• The contents
• The opening of Chapter 1
• Figure 2.1: three pay you more today; only one can keep paying
• Figure 14.1: six quarters of shortfall, and nothing sold

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Who it's for

Retirees who want dependable monthly income from businesses they actually understand, whether the rollover has just landed or a portfolio built some other way has disappointed.

Try the free Dividend Income Calculator.

Where to go next

• The Retirement Income Series Harvested: Covered Calls and Cash-Secured Puts for Retirement Income Dean Cross

  
  The Retirement Income SeriesHarvested: Covered Calls and Cash-Secured Puts for Retirement Income
• The Options Strategy Series Hedged Dean Cross

  
  The Options Strategy SeriesHedged